Sermon Tone Analysis

You may have seen the Tom Hanks movie, “Cast Away”.

The story line is that Hanks characterIs a time obsessed engineer for FedEx.

He is in a long-term relationship with Kelly who he lives with in Memphis Tennessee.

At a Christmas Eve party with relatives Chuck is called by FedEx to solve a problem in Malaysia.

While flying through a storm the FedEx plane crashes into the Pacific Ocean.

Chuck is the lone survivor and is washed ashore on an island that is uninhabited.

Chuck spends four years shipwrecked on the island.

You will rightly recall that his only friend was a volleyball named Wilson.

Eventually, Chuck is rescued and returns to civilization.

He's been through everything.

Cut his hand, a failed attempt to escape the island, and infected tooth that he removed with the help of ice skates.

He's seen a lot..

One thing had kept him alive in the island.

He had opened any packages that washed ashore save one.

That one package was sent from a woman named Bettina Peterson in Canadian Texas.

It has a strange set of Angel's wings stamped on the box.

Now that Chuck is home he has a new life to begin.

In a strange act of closing out that part of his life, he drives to Canadian Texas with the package sent by Bettina Peterson.

When he arrives at the address, he finds the house empty.

He leaves the package on the porch with a note that explained this package had saved his life.

He leaves the house and drives out to a crossroads.

He stops his car, gets out of the car and begins to look at a map and where he's headed next.

A friendly woman drives up to the crossroads where Chuck is standing and helps to explain what each of the roads lead.

As she drives away and Chuck looks to the back of her truck he notices the angel wings painted on the back of the truck that were also stamped on the front of the FedEx box.

Chuck walks out to the center of the intersection and looks in all directions finally looking in the direction that the truck had driven off into.

And he smiles faintly.

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You get the impression that Chuck has to make a decision.

I remember when we went to see the movie at the theater, Janice and I were uncertain if he was going back to the house to meet Bettina Peterson, or if he was actually going in another direction.

But the reality was he was a crossroads.

Every crossroads has a struggle.

For Chuck, it was a struggle of about four years.

For Jacob, it was about 21 years.

In the time between Jacob leaving his parents and going to his uncle Laban's, he has married his wife – two wives in fact, has 12 sons along with an unknown number of daughters, has amassed quite a bit of capital in the form of sheep and cattle, and is done all of this while dealing with a shyster for lack of better terminology.

But Jacob struggle was larger than those 21 years.

It began in his childhood home when he took both the birthright and the blessing from his brother Esau.

The struggle was big enough that he had to leave that home to get away from her brother that wanted to kill him.

All of this was building to the significant turning point that we have read about this morning.

You see Jacob is headed back home.

He is going to meet that brother that wanted to kill him.

He is going to face all of his past in a very real way.

And I suspect the pressure was building.

It seems to have come to a climax on this night when Jacob wwas on the final leg of his journey.on

this night, Jacob wrestled with a man.

Was this just any man?

Is this symbolic of what happened?

Did Jacob really wrestled with God?

Is this a prayer that’s personified?

I don’t know.

All I know is that the Scripture says Jacob wrestled with a man all night.

He struggled.

And in that struggle he came to a crossroads.

The Struggle was in the Darkness

this darkness symbolize Jacob situation.

He was seized with fear at the prospect of meeting his brother who he betrayed.

There was great uncertainty for the future that lay before him.

Would his brother still be angry?

What his brother want to kill him?

With his brother even recognize him after all these years?

That was great darkness around the situation.

I doubt that if Jacob realized that this wrestling match was with God he would have ever proceeded to the battle.

I suspect he would’ve run.

I doubt that if Jacob realized the battle would last all night he would have ever entered into it.

But it was a match with God and it did last all night.

Some of the greatest struggles that you and I have in our life are marked by darkness, fear, uncertainty – the unknown.

And some of us go through those struggles when it seems like they’re going to last even longer than they did for Jacob, beyond the nighttime.

In fact, for some of us it seems like they will never end.

The struggle was not one of victory but rather defeat

as we read this passage it would be easy to understand it as a victory for Jacob.

It was anything but.

This struggle, this wrestling match, was a mere of his life.

He had not won the victory he had survived the battle in his life it was a battle of doing the right thing or of doing his thing.

In this wrestling match it was a matter of survival against an unknown, unseen, enemy that wrestled with him all night long.

Don’t miss the point of the story when you read it.

Jacob did not walk away victorious-he walked away defeated.

But he struggled well.

So much so that his assailant had to resort to extraordinary measures.

The struggle was not one of victory but rather defeat

after the struggle, the assailant gave himself the advantage.

With the supernatural unexplainable blow, the assailant did something to disjoint Jacob’s hip.

I cannot imagine the pain.

in the midst of the struggle, Jacob encountered something he had never encountered before.

He encountered someone that he could not defeat.

He could wrestle with, he could struggle with whoever this was-but he could not defeat them.

God touched the strongest joint of Jacob, and it shriveled.

Jacob self-confidence also shriveled.

His normal tricky weapons were lame and useless.

They failed him in his struggle with God.

What had once worked over many years in many ways was useless in this struggle.

Something now dawned on Jacob-his struggle was not with Esau, his father Isaac, his father-in-law laden, or a family situation it was difficult… His great struggle was with God.

The Struggle brought Jacob to a Place of Full Disclosure

this being with whom Jacob wrestled asked for his name.

Like the old television series, “cheers”, God already knew Jacob’s name.

God knew everything about Jacob.

Yet he wanted Jacob to say his name.

Remember that in the Old Testament ones name was closely linked to one’s nature.

Jacob-the wily one, the trip or upper, the trickster… The point was probably becoming clear in Jacob’s mind.

Who he was and his pattern of life had to be radically changed.

When this being asked Jacob to say his name, he was asking Jacob to tell the truth about himself.

The” heel catcher” had been found out.